Strength training and BJJ Competition Prep

The other night, one of my fighters asked me, “How should my strength training change when I’m cutting weight?”

It’s a good question, and one that anyone preparing for a BJJ competition or MMA fight should consider.

Should I stop strength training when cutting weight?

The simple answer: no. Here’s why:

Preserve Strength

You are training for an athletic competition, be it a BJJ match or a MMA fight, where your goal is to impose your physical will upon another human being. There’s no way of getting around it: strength will matter. All else being equal (weight, experience, ability), strength will be the factor that wins. You want to be the strongest person on the day.

Injury Resilience

There is some evidence to suggest that having more muscle mass can make athletes more resilient to injury; one meta-analysis found that injury risk was reduced by ~66%. This can occur via joint stabilization, through needing less strength to perform athletic feats (thus reducing wear and tear on joints and connective tissue), and simply having more mass to absorb punishment. Strength training also improves joint health by essentially forcing blood into areas that typically have poor blood flow, facilitating connective tissue strengthening and repair.

To cut out strength training when you are not only in a caloric deficit, but also when your other physical activity is likely peaking as you train for your competition or fight is a solid recipe for injury; maybe not immediate, but probabilistically in the long-term.

How does strength training help?

Here’s some of the science behind what happens when we strength train.

Catabolic vs Anabolic Signaling.

When we exercise, we stimulate predominantly one of two different hormonal signals: anabolism or catabolism. While it’s definitely more complex than this, they are essentially opposing signals. (This is a super-simplified explanation; it’s much more nuanced than this, but this will work for the sake of this discussion.)

Anabolic signaling is what stimulates muscle growth. This is what happens after a strength training session where you are lifting at or near failure. We are telling our caveman bodies that we need to throw that rock farther and harder, so we need more muscle.

Catabolic signaling reduces mass. This is what happens after a cardio session. We are telling our bodies that we need to run away from that sabertoothed tiger, and we need to do so for longer and faster. To do that, our bodies want to shed excess mass. As muscle is metabolically expensive to maintain and heavier than adipose tissue (bodyfat), we will shed unneeded muscle mass.

Energy Sources

Our bodies can get the energy it needs from three sources: carbs, fat, and protein.

Carbs are the most readily-available source, and will (in most instances) be the first thing your body turns to in order to keep the lights on. (This is excluding metabolic processes that use fat or protein, and looking at basic energy consumption for day-to-day activity and exercise.)

When we are in a caloric deficit, our bodies need to get more creative with finding energy. When the carbs run low, our bodies will then have a choice: protein or fat.

Yes, we will also burn fat in a caloric deficit, but unless we tell the body otherwise, we will lose some muscle mass, and therefore strength, as well.

As mentioned above, muscle is metabolically expensive to maintain, so the body wants to shed anything it doesn’t need. In the case of a caloric deficit, our bodies will also want to be more efficient with the energy it’s getting. Think of it like a company that is having a period of slower sales. With less money coming in, it will look for ways to cut costs to make the most of the revenue it is getting. Our bodies will look to shed unneeded muscle to help meet the current caloric budget.

Controlling the Signals

Remember that when we lift at or near failure, we are sending anabolic signals; we are telling our bodies, “We need this muscle.” When cutting weight, if we are sending a steady supply of anabolic signals (lifting twice a week can suffice), the body will prioritize metabolizing adipose tissue over shedding muscle. This will preserve more muscle during your cut.

Will you lose some muscle? Probably. This is likely unavoidable when losing weight. However, by continuing your strength training and adapting it for your cut, you’ll preserve far more, probably most of it, while losing weight.

How should I adapt by strength training when preparing for a competition?

You can’t blindly carry on when in a camp. Here’s how you can adapt your training to meet your needs while allowing you to train hard on the mats when in camp:

1. Reduce your days in the gym. If you were lifting 3 or more days a week, cut back to 2 days a week. That’s all that’s needed to preserve strength.

2. Go into maintainance. Either stop progessively overloading all of your sets (+5 pounds or +1 rep every week), or slow it down. If you have some lifts that are still feeling relatively easy (you feel more than 3 RIR), you can still push them, but maybe progress every other week instead of every week. Hold at your current weight/reps/sets to preserve strength.

3. 3 weeks before the competition: cut all of your working sets to 2. Same weight, same reps, just fewer sets. We’re starting our taper; this will preserve strength while reducing fatigue.

4. 2 weeks before the competition: cut back to 1 working set of everything. Feel free to go hard in that one set: progress your weight (not too much, no ego lifting) and make that 1 set of each lift count. If you need some help determining where you should be weight-wise, use a 1 rep max calculator and aim for 80-90% of your max weight.

5. 1 week before the competition: No lifting. This should be an easy week, with only enough cardio to maintain what you’ve built, and focusing on your mental game and your final push to make weight. (If you’ve done this properly, you should be 5-10 pounds from your target, and doing a water cut.) This week is all about relaxing and letting your fatigue drop so that you’ll be as fresh as can be for your event.

6. Competition day: Go get ‘em. You’ve got this. Leave it all on the mat.

7. Week after competition: You’re going to be itching to get right back to full activity, but hold on: you need to give yourself time to recover. You just trained hard for 6-8 weeks, lost some weight, and participated in some form of combat sports. You’re likely beat up right now, even if you don’t realize it. Take a week to relax. No lifting, minimal cardio, minimal rolling.

8. Two weeks after competition: Now you can start easing your way back into lifting. Cut your weight back to 80% of your last regular working set (not 80% of your max), do the same number of reps and sets from before your training camp, and start progressing your weight back up 5-10 pounds a week (depending on how each of your lifts feels).

Why this works

This plan will maintain your strength while leaving you enough gas in the tank to get your work in on the mats because you are doing the minimum required to continue adequate anabolic signaling to maintain (and even grow) muscle without adding to your systemic fatigue. By tapering at the end of your camp, you now start reducing your fatigue while keeping your strength the same. Some studies have shown that we can maintain strength gains in the absence of strength training for several weeks after ceasing weight lifting.

Also, you’ll build back to where you were relatively quickly. Studies have shown that regardless of time off from training (anywhere from two weeks to several months), the time it takes to get back to previously-trained levels (not accounting for injuries) is anywhere from 2-8 weeks.

Works cited:

James et al., 2016
Physiological characteristics of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu athletes.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26817779/

Lauersen et al., 2018
Strength training reduces sports injuries.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30131332/

Magnusson et al., 2010
Tendon adaptation to loading.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19996364/

Murach & Bagley, 2016
Less is more: resistance training volume and hypertrophy.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27015287/

Wang et al., 2010
Resting metabolic rate and body composition.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20497760/

Longland et al., 2016
Higher protein intake preserves lean mass during energy deficit.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26817506/

Bickel et al., 2011
Reduced training frequency and maintenance of strength.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21131862/

McMaster et al., 2013
Strength loss after detraining.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23364272/

Gundersen, 2016
Muscle memory and myonuclei.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26792335/